Espen Aarseth, "Paradigms and Perspectives"

(In Cybertext)

- Cybertext as a perspective, not an object
- Text as material machine (not just a syntagmatic chain of signifiers)
- Semiotics is insufficient
- How to approach a complex system with emergent behaviour (can it be a meaning-making system?)
- Look beyond the surface of sign/user and incorporate the "dual materiality" of cybernetic sign processes (code and presentation/expression/execution)
- Nonlinearity is an ambiguous, difficult concept
- Actual machines, not metaphorical ones (akin to Juul's "real rules?")
- Nonlinear vs multilinear
- Distinguish between the object/text and our experience of it (according to Aarseth, the object/text exists independently, while the experience is contingent)
- Books are not essentially linear, computers are not essentially non-linear (these are cultural-ideological conceptions)
- Interactivity is also problematic
- Cyborg aesthetics, texts as "cyborg fields" - who is in control?
- Control cannot be clearly located at any one point